The Supreme Court on Friday sided with the Trump administration in its push to use a controversial database to review state voter rolls. David Becker, executive director at the Center for Election Innovation and Research, joins CBS News to discuss what this means for voters.
Page B1From§Eachthe midnight edition — 26 September 2026
Same voter database, blocked by an appeals court, approved by the Supreme Court twenty days later, unaltered.
As it ran on the front
The tool the administration wanted on September 8 is the tool the administration got on September 26. In between, nothing changed except which court was asked.
On September 5, a federal appeals court panel declined to let Homeland Security reopen access to a voter-screening tool that incorporated Social Security data. The block held. Three days later, on September 8, the administration went around that same litigation and asked the Supreme Court directly to lift it, telling the Court the database — the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system — had been modified last year to combine Social Security information with citizenship records "to improve the speed and reliability" of voter-roll checks. The Washington Examiner ran that phrase straight out of the filing, no rebuttal attached.…
…(cont) The request filed with the Supreme Court describes no changes to the database made between the appeals court's refusal and the administration's ask. It is the same combined file the panel had just declined to unfreeze. On September 26, the Supreme Court granted it anyway.
CBS marked the ruling by bringing on David Becker, executive director at the Center for Election Innovation and Research, to walk viewers through what changed for them. The New York Times ran its own version of the story on September 25 stacked one line above coverage of an approaching storm — the database clearing the country's highest court, filed next to the weather.
The database did not get safer in that window. It got a different address. That is the mechanism: you do not answer the objection, you outlast the court that raised it, and you keep filing until the docket runs out of courts willing to say no. The voters whose Social Security numbers now sit cross-referenced against a citizenship list were not in the room for either ruling. They are, however, on the rolls the ruling now reaches, in every state where an official decides to run the check.
“The database didn't change between the block and the yes — the address did. That's the whole trick: you don't win the case, you keep filing until you find a court that hasn't heard the objection yet. Your Social Security number is now part of the file they use to decide whether you stay on the rolls.”
“Look, the filing calls it improved speed and reliability — that's the government's own language, I'm just reading it back to you. Cross-referencing citizenship records with Social Security data sounds invasive when you put it that way, but it's modernization, that's all it is. Did I say invasive? Scratch that, I meant efficient.”
The receipts
Also, the East Coast braces for a powerful storm. Here’s the latest at the end of Friday.
· Trump administration asks Supreme Court to allow use of citizenship database from the morgue, 8 Sep 2026
· DOJ asks Supreme Court to unblock voter database linking Social Security and citizenship records from the morgue, 8 Sep 2026
· Appeals Court Maintains Block on Federal Voter Identification Tool from the morgue, 5 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.